Many of the today's motor vehicles are constructed to assume a low bonnet height in order to improve design features and aerodynamic characteristics of the vehicles. In such motor cars, the fore end of the vehicle i.e., fore end of the bonnet) can hardly been seen, or can not be seen at all, from the driver's seat; on narrow streets and parking lots, however, there arises a need for the vehicle driver to accurately recognize a fore end position of the vehicle. Heretofore, corner poles have been known as visual recognition assistance device for allowing a human vehicle driver to easily grasp operational feelings of the vehicle. Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2003-252121 discloses an example of a telescopically constructed corner pole.
Generally, in cases where the ground surface/road surface, on which tall buildings or other tall objects stand together in large numbers, is invisible from the driver's seat and thus there is little clue to positional recognition, a vehicle driver tends to lose a sense of distance due to a phenomenon commonly called “borrowed landscape effect”, which is one of the optic illusions known from long ago in the field of the cognitive science.
The conventionally-known visual recognition assistance devices typically in the form of corner poles, including the one disclosed in the 2003-252121 publication, are constructed in such a manner that the vehicle driver in the driver's seat can not see the ground surface or vehicle body surface (i.e., bonnet and the like) and can only see a distal end portion of the corner pole. Although the distal end of the corner pole can be visually recognized, it is sometimes difficult for the vehicle driver to accurately and instantly recognize a distance to the corner pole due to loss of the sense of distance as noted above. Therefore, there has been a demand for a visual recognition assistance device which permits accurate and instant positional recognition of a fore end portion of a vehicle.